Secrets of the Heart

22

The following morning Agnes made her way down Charlborough’s main street to the surgery, a modern building perched on the outskirts of the Bee Orchid housing estate.

Duggie Sutherland had been taking care of Agnes since she was twelve and knew her every nook and cranny well enough to ask any question he pleased. Duggie hated the new surgery and longed to be back in the cramped, damp rooms he had once occupied before they metamorphosed into a Group Practice. ‘How’s the air-conditioning?’ she teased, knowing that it sent him into a frenzy.

‘Do not ask.’ He did a quick test and it did not take him long to confirm what Agnes suspected. About seven weeks.’

In the clinical surgery, the confirmation seemed so matter-of-fact with none of the panic and disbelief of the past few weeks. Agnes slid back into her T-shirt. ‘Sod’s law of averages,’ she remarked. ‘It happened only once after months of abstinence.’

‘Hold out your arm.’ He attached the blood-pressure equipment. ‘This is not a scientific answer, Agnes, but it could be because you were ready.’

‘That’s pop psychology, Duggie.’

‘Why didn’t you come to see me at once? Or anyone?’

She looked down at her lap. ‘You know what they say about people in burning houses hiding under beds and in cupboards?’

‘No. Tell me about it. You might like to know that your blood pressure is down in your boots, which will be making you feel a bit odd. It will readjust in a couple of weeks.’ He chucked her under the chin. ‘Optimism, my girl. New life.’

She sat down on the chair by his desk while he wrote up the notes. ‘Duggie, I find the prospect of having a baby terrifying. I wasn’t planning it. I’m not ready…’ She pulled desperately on a strand of hair. ‘I wasn’t envisaging this bit of biology being thrust on me quite yet.’

He put his head to one side.

She knew what he was going to say. ‘No,’ she said sadly. ‘Don’t even think it, Duggie. I can’t have an abortion or send it away. I couldn’t. I haven’t managed much in the way of coherent thought but I just know I couldn’t do it.’ She shrugged. ‘More fool me.’ She tugged at her hair and winced. ‘How typical of Nature to make a muddle.’

‘Or you,’ suggested Duggie.

She pushed her plait back over her shoulder, dug her hands into her linen skirt pockets and sent him a tiny, tremulous smile. ‘Point taken.’

She pictured herself bowed down with a buggy, nappies in a bag, a baby on a hip, encumbered and struggling with the tired, I-can’t-take-much-more expression she had so often seen on mothers. They looked so battered, so shell-shocked and resentful. ‘I don’t want this baby, Duggie. I don’t know how I’m going to manage and I can’t feel anything for it except terminal crossness with myself.’

He tucked her notes into the folder. ‘Is the father involved?’

‘No, he isn’t.’

Later, Agnes knelt by her bed – a old, childish pose, long discarded. She rested her head on its hard edge and the position soothed the nausea that tormented her.

Why did I tell Kitty?

The clear motives and clear vision had vanished. So had the Agnes who knew what was what, who believed in the rules. In their place was confusion. How could she have done what she had done?

On Thursday, Kitty left a message for Julian at the office with Angela to say that she would be coming up to London for the evening and that he was not to worry about supper. He returned to the flat in the Barbican to find the table laid with candles and flowers and Kitty busy in the kitchen.

It had been an awful day and he craved peace and quiet, but he forced himself to look pleased. ‘Have I missed a birthday or something?’

She put a couple of steaks under the grill. ‘Hallo, darling. I hope you don’t mind. I’ll be gone in the morning and I won’t see you at the weekend.’

Kitty never went away without elaborate checking and cross-checking. Presumably he was being sent a signal about which he had no inkling and, at this precise moment, no curiosity either. Kitty fiddled with the cutlery. Expectant.

‘Where are you going?’

Kitty’s expression was the one she assumed when she was giving him a present. ‘I’m going to be checked out at a clinic.’ She bent down to look at the meat. ‘To see if everything is working.’

‘Oh, Kitty.’

She turned away to attend to the salad in the sink. ‘I just want to be sure, Julian. Before it’s too late.’

All he could see was her averted back. ‘Kitty, please stop doing that and look at me.’ Obediently, she turned round. ‘Now, listen. You don’t really want children, do you?’

She fiddled with the gold chain at her throat. ‘But I think you do, Julian. You admitted it that time when we talked before.’

‘That was just an aside. I didn’t expect you to take me so literally.’

‘Asides are often very telling.’

Kitty was on form. Full marks, Kitty. He studied the expression on the flawless features and saw a new stubbornness. ‘But you can’t construct an entire case around a remark.’

‘Don’t be pompous, Julian.’

‘Am I? Sorry.’

Kitty picked up the salad dressing. ‘Think about the theory of evolution you’re so interested in. I’ve thought about it, Julian, carefully. It must have occurred to you – and you were sweet to understand my wishes in the past – to understand what sort of woman I am, but one of the fundamentals must be to reproduce. It’s taken me a bit of time to work it out. But that makes it sound so clinical. It isn’t meant to be like that.’ Under the grill the meat was spitting and she dived towards it. ‘I would like to give you what you want.’

‘Kitty, this is madness.’

She straightened up, flushed and, clearly, already pregnant with this new development in their strange life together. ‘No, it isn’t. It’s just another stage.’

In the office the next morning, Angela appeared in skintight shiny trousers and a little jacket and informed Julian that Harold wished to see him urgently.

Harold approached his boss with the wariness of the messenger who understands there is a more than even chance he will have turned into the kill by the end of the interview. If he had not known what was coming, Julian might have been amused.

‘Julian, I can’t make those figures work as you asked. In particular, the Lincolnshire figures. They don’t look good.’

He slid papers on to the desk and Julian gave them a quick once-over. ‘You’re wrong, Harold. It’s not a question of them not looking good. They’re disastrous.’

‘I think I meant that.’

‘Well? Can I have a breakdown?’

Harold looked even worse. ‘For example, the Lincolnshire project. The take-up on the houses is less than a third. That means…’ He cleared his throat. ‘It means only thirty houses have been sold, and none of the ones in the higher bracket price range. We needed to sell sixty-five to achieve the margin. I’ve run a check on the local employment figures. Not good. The young are moving south to look for jobs and agricultural wages have hit rock bottom. The upturn we calculated on has not happened.’

Julian informed Harold that he could add to the list of woes. A letter had come in from Bristling’s factory, who had decided to pull the plug on the Lincolnshire project for precisely the same reasons.

Harold was trying hard to keep some sort of control. ‘Protest is also building over the Sussex site. The antis have discovered that the houses would be built on part of an old smugglers’ route. The heritage people are jumping up and down.’ Harold dug his hands into the pockets of his fashionable linen suit.

‘I believe it,’ said Julian.

The two men were silent.

‘Maybe,’ offered Harold, ‘we could palm off the Lincolnshire project on the council.’

‘I think not.’

Julian took another look at the figures. If a profit warning on the next quarter’s results was going to be necessary, then the share price would be affected. He ordered Harold to arrange a couple of emergency meetings and to get himself a cup of coffee. Harold disappeared.

Although he had known for some months that this might happen, Julian needed a few minutes’ grace. Daily, he had watched the figures, adjusting projections here, strategy there, but his fire-fighting tactics had not been sufficient.

At some point, he had made a mistake and, like the gene pool heading for extinction, taken the wrong turning. Nothing overtly dramatic, but decisive nevertheless. Kitty had talked about evolution, and wrong turnings littered evolutionary history. He was desperate for this not to happen to Portcullis. Nor should it have done so. In theory the genes for survival were in place – his team, their experience, the backers and shareholders. Surely it was a question of reshaping projections and vision to fit into an altered context. Yes. He must act. He would act. He spread his fingers along the edge of the desk and pressed down hard to release the pressure in his shoulders, then rang for Angela.

Thus, Julian went into battle to hammer a rescue package into shape.

By the end of the day, he was exhausted, all attack played out. Gradually, the building emptied, leaving a series of lit rooms. Julian got up, extracted a bottle of whisky from the cabinet and poured himself a slug.

Much later still, he picked up his papers, stowed them in his briefcase and left the office. He needed to go home, to his real home, and the need was so powerful that he could think of nothing else.

When he arrived he found he was almost gasping with relief.

Inside Cliff House, the heat had gathered and the rooms were stifling. Julian flung open the windows one by one and let fresher salt air stream in. He leaned on the window-sill and listened for a long time to the sea. He may have lost his way temporarily in the City’s wild and dangerous waters but he had returned to this anchorage. As he always did.

Then he went to bed.

Agnes spent a good part of Saturday morning recovering from the morning nausea. This was of a different variety from the one that floored her late in the afternoon and different again from the late evening bout that Mother Nature slipped in for good measure before bed. So far, she had tried everything: eating cream crackers, no breakfast (that had been bad), a brisk walk, copious amounts of food. Nothing helped and, struggling to achieve all that she had to do, Agnes was astonished that reproduction ever took place, because it was so awful.

She was in the study preparing for a day of financial planning. Probate was through, and she had to face the problems that riddled Flagge House.

Money? Yesterday she had endured a session with Mr Dawkins and the bank manager, and walked over the house with Mr Harvey to work out the priorities. In the Action file on the desk lay various forms for grant applications, all complicated.

She slid her fingers inside the waistband of her trousers and pulled at it gently to give her growing stomach a breathing space. An unseen agency had packed her head with wet wool wadding and reduced her concentration to the level of the average rabbit.

Should she tell Julian about the baby? Surely the tiny package of cells growing inside her had rights. ‘Picture your baby,’ she would say. A smart, hungry, demanding squaller who needs you. When you look back over your life, you will want him or her in the family photos. In place, and part of you. You will have wanted to stand on the rugby touchline cheering him on, or to have ferried a daughter to a late, late party in an unsuitable new dress. Little things that make the throat prick with tears and pride and which make the photograph more alive and better than the one without them.’

The shabbiness of telling and distressing Kitty shamed her; her weakness in having done so shamed her – and she feared the future to which she saw no solution. But she longed to see Julian, with a miserable, aching longing.

She looked round the study, still cluttered with her uncle’s things. A massacre in Africa, dying children, whale slaughter – these and other outrages she had tackled in her work, grown angry over and recorded so that others might feel the same. Yet the terrible truth was that when it came to this point, her own predicament and desires won out.

Agnes picked up the phone and dialled.

An hour later, she drove up to Cliff House, where Julian was waiting.

On the phone, she had said simply, ‘It’s me.’

There was a pause. Agnes, I’m so glad you rang. Can you come down here. Just for the afternoon. Please.’

She hesitated. Actually, I did want to discuss something with you.’

‘Please.’

So there she was at Cliff House and he was opening the door of the car. He bent over and touched her hair. ‘You don’t look well. Are you all right?’

‘And you? You look awful too.’ He shrugged. ‘Kitty?’

‘She’s away’

Julian took Agnes’s hand and led her through the house.

Lunch was waiting on a table under an umbrella on the terrace. They sat down and Julian passed her a spinach salad. ‘All my own work. Tell me what you’ve been doing. Is your aunt better?’

The conversation was heavy with the unsaid. They exchanged news but it was not until he had drunk half a bottle of wine that Julian told her about Portcullis. He was concerned but resolute. ‘I’ve had to do some thinking. I confess that I had been led to believe in my own myth. I wanted to believe in it. But financial pratfalls happen in a business life, and more people struggle back from the brink than is supposed.’ He looked over to Agnes. ‘Unfortunately there’s a good chance that I will fail the people I employ.’

Agnes reached over and held his hand. It seemed to comfort him. ‘I’m sorry.’ The telephone rang but Julian ignored it. It rang and rang, then went silent.

Agnes stirred in her seat. ‘Where is Kitty exactly?’

Julian frowned. ‘She’s gone to a clinic – the subject of children seems to have come up. Look, I don’t want to discuss Kitty’s business.’

She looked down at the table littered with the remains of their lunch. Her baby needed a champion too, she thought passionately, and she was all it had. ‘But we must talk about it. What is Kitty doing?’

He turned his head abruptly away from her and she tumbled to the fact that he hated to be confronted.

‘She thinks we ought to try for a baby.’

She felt the sun beat down on her skin. ‘Do you want children?’

He stirred restlessly. Actually, I think I do.’

‘So Kitty is going to try to give you one.’ Cold in the sun, Agnes put down her fork. She remembered a famous novelist once saying: ‘Relations with people never finish, only stories have an ending.’ Clever Kitty. She understood the precept so well. Faced with Agnes, the enemy, the pregnant enemy, she had gone underground. Kitty was a natural résistante. Oh, clever Kitty, for she had ensured that if she became pregnant Agnes could not possibly take Julian away. Kitty held the prior claim.

Between them they could bat babies back and forth like balls. Not my baby, she thought tiredly. It is not going to be treated like that.

Later, Julian fetched a rug and spread it in the shade by the long grass. The sun was blazing, the sea had calmed to a murmur and, far out, white-sailed boats tacked to and fro. Sleepy and full, they stretched out on the rug and Julian’s arm cradled her head. ‘You must sleep and get rid of those shadows under your eyes.’ He kissed her eyelids. ‘Then you’ll feel better.’

She obeyed, and drowsiness crept through her limbs, anchoring them with a delicious lassitude.

When she woke, the sun had moved and her arms were flushed pink. Dazzled by the light and by sleep, she turned her head to encounter Julian’s next to hers. ‘Magic’ Her gaze alighted on the long grass. Each blade seemed extra sharp. Some were rolled as tight as a pupa’s case, others were upright razors, yet another hung with downy seed-heads. As she watched, an insect crawled through this green underworld. A small, lumbering creature, intent on survival.

Silently, Julian turned Agnes’s face to his and kissed her. ‘It’s very odd, or perhaps it isn’t,’ he informed her, ‘how the longing for proper love infects you at the wrong moment. Or when you least expect it.’

At sea, the tide turned and began to run in.

They were at the end of the garden, leaning on the gate that led on to the cliff path and talking, when they spotted a figure in a pink linen suit walking towards them.

‘Hallo, Julian,’ said Kitty, her red mouth set in a bitter grimace. ‘Didn’t you hear the phone? I rang at lunchtime to tell you I was coming back earlier than planned.’

Kitty’s groomed exterior was immaculate, but underneath there was a terrified animal (the same animal that had taken up residence in Agnes), who was frantically weighing up the options on how to get rid of that enemy.

‘Hallo, Kitty,’ Agnes said, knowing that Kitty was in mortal terror that she had told Julian about the baby.

The two women sized each other up. ‘This time I’m telling you to get out,’ said Kitty, her voice shaking.

‘Kitty…’ Julian took a step towards her.

Kitty squared up to him. ‘I don’t think there’s any point in beating around the bush. Tell Agnes to go,’ she demanded. ‘Now. At once.’ She tugged at Julian’s arm.

‘Kitty…’ Julian removed her hand from his arm. Agnes is here at my invitation. This is not your business.’

Kitty rounded on him. ‘On the contrary, it is my business. We may not have a piece of paper, Julian,’ she was trembling, ‘but we have everything else. We have a marriage.’ She snatched her hands behind her back to hide them. ‘I know it started out as something else, but that’s what it’s ended up as. I must defend it.’

Oh, God, thought Agnes, noting julian’s at-bay expression, I should not be here, and she looked round blindly for her bag. The baby deserves better than this mess. ‘I’ll go-.’

She allowed Julian to see her into the car, placed the key in the ignition and said, ‘I shouldn’t have come. I should have stuck to what I said.’

He looked so miserable and defensive that she almost laughed, the kind of laugh that is the only response to profound misery.

‘Agnes, what did you want to talk to me about?’

‘It was nothing. Go back to Kitty.’

‘Listen,’ he said urgently, ‘you’re right. This can’t go on. Once I’ve sorted out Portcullis, I will sort this out. I promise.’

‘When will Portcullis be sorted out?’

‘I don’t know.’ He placed a hand on the car door.

She avoided looking at him but gazed down at the hand with brown fingers, brushed with fine gold hairs. At least she knew now where she stood.

On the drive back to Flagge House, Agnes’s face and arms glowed with sunburn, and black depression gathered in her heart.

Fact. She had desired and taken, and got herself pregnant. The so very clever, practical Agnes.

Fact. She had an unborn child to consider – and other considerations clustered as thickly. House. Aunts. Herself.

Each time, with both men, she had left a little bit of herself behind. And who could say that if she had told Julian about the baby that, in the end, they would have tired of each other too?

The situation she was in was not new, and there was nothing startling to be deduced from it. She gripped the wheel and drove on far too fast. The struggle between will, inclination and stricture was as old as time.

After the sound of Agnes’s car had died away, Julian said, ‘I want to talk to you, Kitty.’

‘No.’ Kitty had collected herself. She smiled her society smile but avoided looking at him and proceeded to lay out her agenda. ‘There’s no point in raking it over. We shall have to forget this incident. I shall. Let’s be normal. Let’s just be very, very normal.’

Kitty, the skilled, emotional debt collector. In little ‘normal’ ways, Julian would be asked to pay – as he had in the past. He considered producing the old arguments about their arrangement and their separate freedoms, but they no longer applied. ‘I’m sorry we’ve reached this point.’

‘What did you expect?’ she flashed.

‘But you agreed.’

‘Sometimes, Julian, you have the emotional age of an newborn.’

‘OK. OK.’ He paced up and down. She was right to question him. ‘Kitty, if my behaviour is making you so unhappy that you feel forced to go off to clinics, then we must do something. Make a decision.’

The look she gave him made him flush. It was of pity and superior understanding. ‘Nonsense, darling. We’re fine. It will all settle down.’

Kitty fetched her luggage from the drive, dumped it in the hall and followed him into the kitchen. ‘Shall I make some coffee?’

Let’s be normal, please, let us be normal

Julian was searching in the cupboard for the mineral water. ‘No, thanks.’

Kitty surveyed the washing-up and ran water into the bowl. She spoke with the same light, relentless note. ‘Having visitors has obviously turned you into a pig. How long has this lot been here? By the way, did I tell you that Vita Huntingdon’s daughter is already pregnant?’

‘Kitty, I know this is difficult, but please concentrate.’

Kitty scraped the plates clean and tipped them into the hot water. ‘Julian, over the years I have learned many things from you. One of them is, don’t give up easily. You have given me excellent tuition.’

‘Clearly.’

His sarcasm lashed Kitty into retaliation. She dug her hands into the water and said furiously, ‘Don’t talk to me as if I was some business rival, or someone to play boardroom games with. I’m not one of your projects and I’m not a profit margin. I am the woman you live with. Or, rather, your version of it… Like it or not, you’re committed to me.’ She seized the dishcloth. ‘How often have I been in this kitchen, organizing operations to keep your life running smoothly? Countless times. How many times have I sorted the house out, rearranging cushions, hanging clothes, putting everything back into the order that you like? You demand, Julian. How many times have I bitten back requests to accompany you to London and stayed here as you wished? I have been here, in your life as well as your bed, and I will make you acknowledge that, if it kills me.’

It was enough. Without another word, he walked out of the kitchen and the study door banged shut.

He emerged just as Kitty’s hand was creeping towards the half-empty wine bottle on the kitchen table. ‘Fatal on an empty stomach,’ she murmured, with an irritating laugh. Julian refilled his glass with water.

Kitty gave in. ‘I’ll have some wine.’ She drank, her lipsticked mouth sipping fast and neatly. ‘I needed that.’ She put the glass down and fiddled with a charm on her bracelet. ‘Julian, I’m sorry for my outburst.’

The depths of his indifference to her apology terrified her. ‘I understand.’

‘I was defending my territory,’ she added hastily. ‘It was a hitch, nothing to worry about. All marriages have hitches. People survive. It’s a matter of will, an act of will. Anyway, I came to tell you that the clinic was very positive and – ‘

‘Kitty, we are not married. The contract was different.’

She gave an impatient tsk. ‘Words, Julian. You may be good on numbers but you need a few lessons in what matters.’

He stared at her. Kitty was correct. What expertise he possessed lay not in emotions but in theory and, at this precise moment, he was too embattled to change anything.

Kitty straightened in her chair and ran her hand over her hair to check that it was in place. She spoke with the fluency of someone well rehearsed in their lines. ‘We are married. You may think that this performance of weekends only and separate houses keeps you nicely insulated. But it doesn’t.’

‘You accepted it.’

‘Well, now I don’t. I’ve changed.’ She leaned over the table towards him, her face so soft with love that he could not bear it. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Julian. You’re feeling sad and trapped and besotted with someone else. But you know it will fade. If love isn’t fed, it dies of starvation…’ Kitty faltered, for the irony was cruel. ‘The other night you were honest and said that ten years is about the limit for any one relationship. Maybe that’s true. But it seems stupid to be condemned to repeating it with different people. Why don’t we just accept that we’re at a different stage?’

He looked down into his glass. ‘Why do you put up with all this, Kitty?’

‘You know those letters you were reading?’ asked the desperate Kitty.

‘Those damn letters,’ he muttered.

‘Well, the farmer wrote something along the lines that his life was empty without Mary, for she was the other half of his soul and without her he possessed only half a soul.’ Kitty reached up and took off her large, gold clip earrings and laid one down on the table. ‘That is me, Julian…’ she placed the second beside it ‘… and how I feel about you.’

‘Kitty. I can’t say the same. I’m sorry’

She sprang to her feet and her chair went winging back along the floor. ‘I beg you, Julian. Don’t leave me.’ She flung herself at Julian’s feet and slid her arm around his knees.

Guilty, despairing, repelled, Julian looked down at Kitty, a woman he had partly made who was wholly his responsibility. Sick with love that was not for Kitty, he put out a hand and stroked the highlighted head bent in front of him.

That night in the bedroom, they undressed. Kitty opened drawers, creamed her face, blew a drift of powder off the surface of the dressing-table and brushed her hair. Julian soaked in a bath, listened to the radio, ran more hot water, dropped a large towel on the floor and left it where it fell.

They lay in bed, exchanged a few words about the alarm clock, the whereabouts of the water glass, what time they would get up. The light snapped off and, with profound thankfulness, they waited for the dark to hide them from each other.

Eyes burning and chest occasionally shuddering from the aftermath of her crying, Kitty lay awake for a long time. Then, very daring, she put out a hand, touched the form beside her and… Julian flinched.

At that, Kitty walked to the edge of the precipice and was forced to look down.

On Monday morning, Angela greeted Julian in his office in a tight Lurex dress with a fake peony in her hair, which did nothing to hide her intelligence. On the desk were a list of calls, his appointment book, a tray of coffee and biscuits and his correspondence.

Before the afternoon was out, Julian together called his young, trendy, socially aware team and gave them a rundown on the situation. Then he dispatched some of them by helicopter to reconnoitre twenty acres of farmland near Bath being sold by its broke owner – land so expensive that the margins might prove impossible. He also called in Harold, who was wearing yet another variant of the crumpled linen suit but whose trendiness was cancelled out by his ashen face. Again they went over the figures.

By mid-morning on Tuesday, the crisis was full-blown. None of the banks had shown any interest in putting together a rescue package and the share price was on the slide. Worse, Legatt’s, the rival firm, had sniffed what was in the wind and was hovering, ready to launch a hostile takeover bid.

Harold was white to the gills and shaking. Julian took pity on him. ‘This won’t be your last crisis, or your worst.’

Harold closed his eyes for a second. ‘If you say so.’

They were standing together by the office window, overlooking the clogged street below. Julian punched the younger man’s shoulder gently. ‘Use your wits to think up something, but don’t worry too much. The Somerset deal might come through.’

He knew, and Harold knew, that it was touch and go.

Much depended on the Somerset deal, and on Wednesday morning Julian helicoptered down to the area. It was land owned by a farmer who, as soon as the subsidies came in from Europe, had abandoned mixed farming in favour of turning specialist cereal grower. But his profits had been eaten into by the variety of diseases that tend to attack monocultures and, despite huge applications of pesticide, the farm had failed to thrive. Now, the soil was dead and the farmer wanted out, to retire to France.

Julian walked the bare fields, the dry chalky soil crumbling under his feet. It offered the sort of opportunity on which Portcullis thrived, and Julian returned to London feeling marginally more positive, especially as the share price had steadied.

He returned to the Barbican in the late summer twilight, in the cusp before the razzle of lights took over from the dusk, through a city rattling with discarded polystyrene, and clotted with commuters.

The following morning a phone call from Harold woke him at seven thirty. ‘Legatt’s have launched their bid,’ he reported.

Julian swiped a finger across his throat. ‘That’s that, then.’